


The Boy from Rain

by phantasmist



Category: Naruto
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Good Akatsuki (Naruto), M/M, implied possibility of mpreg
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-03-06 13:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13412703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantasmist/pseuds/phantasmist
Summary: Obito hadn't meant to steal the baby. It happened by accident.





	1. Chapter 1

Obito hadn't planned to steal the baby. It just sort of happened. One minute he was looking down at his sensei's child--and Kushina's child--whose birth had killed the parents, and a bunch of other people besides. And now all that massive and murderous power was locked up in him. Sealed at the bruised navel, where the birth cord was tied. Because he was that young still. Just a little more than a whole day old, with all the rest of the gooey, fragile look of a newborn about him. Nurses came into the room to look after him, and Obito stepped backwards into the shadows. They didn't see the flame patterned mask, the single eyehole, the black cloak with red clouds. Didn't know he was there at all.

And it was just--they hated the kid. He could tell. They hated him and they were afraid. They took care of him, fed him and changed him and stuff. But they didn't smile. Didn't look. Didn't touch, except quick and efficiently, almost at arm's length. When they left the room again, the boy was giving these sleepy little hiccupping squeaks. Half-crying. And they just shut the door.

And it occurred to Obito then that the kid's life was going to absolutely suck. It wasn't his fault. He hadn't agreed to being the vessel of the ninetails. But everyone was going to hate him for it anyway.

So that was why when he stepped back out of the shadows, he went straight to the cradle and bundled the baby up in its blankets and took it out the window with him. It wasn't what people said later--that he was an evil mastermind, and of course an Uchiha, and wanted to get his hands on a hugely powerful weapon and install it in his gang of radicalist mercenaries. It was that he couldn't stand the thought of the child Kushina and Minato had wanted so much, and would have loved so dearly, growing up all alone.

\----------

"You should have talked to me first."

"I've been talking to you for hours."

"First! Before you did this!" Kakashi, who was pacing back and forth across the apartment they shared at the Tower in Hidden Rain, stopped and turned to face Obito. Appearing through kamui with the baby and shouting _surprise!_ had not gone quite as well as Obito had hoped, and the fight that ensued had brought Yahiko in from another part of the headquarters. He had seen the two of them, and the newborn wailing on the bed, and left again without making any comment.

The argument simmered to nothing, as most of their arguments did after a while. Obito sat on the bed with the baby in his lap and traced his ungloved fingers over the softness of the golden cheek, the cornsilk paleness of the hair. The dogs had all piled around him to stare. Occasionally one of them would bend its head down and whuff softly against the newborn, touch it with a damp nose, lick it with a pink tongue.

Kakashi sighed. He approached the bed and knelt beside it, so his elbows rested on the mattress and the rumpled sheets. His broad, scarred hands reached out and then hesitated.

"You want to hold him?"

"No. I don't want you to be holding him, either. Are you sure you're doing it right?"

"I am an Uchiha," Obito pointed out. "I've been holding babies all my life. I have about a zillion little cousins, remember?"

"Yeah, but--"

"Even one that was born like just two months ago."

"If you wanted a baby why didn't you just steal that one?" Kakashi demanded in exasperation.

"Do you know what my aunt and uncle would do to me?"

"Are you not worried about what Leaf's special forces are going to do to us when they find out you stole the ninetails?"

That thought was genuinely not as frightening to Obito as the thought of having to face Fugaku or Mikoto, if he'd made off with their new little bundle of joy. "Look..." he began again, arguing more quietly now. "Think about it. About what they're going to do to this kid. He doesn't deserve it."

Kakashi was watching him. The gray eye and the red one fixed on his face. Really listening now, not just trying to get him to take the boy back to the village. His eyebrows drew together slightly. A frown. He knew--maybe Kakashi knew better than anyone--how cruel the Hidden Leaf could be. How much damage simple hatred could do. If a warrior like Sakumo could die of misery, of loneliness, then what chance did a little boy have? That was something Obito didn't quite want to say. And he hadn't said it, even when they were shouting at one another. There were lines the two of them didn't cross, even in anger.

"I get it," Kakashi said, at length. One of his hands had dropped near enough that the blonde baby, wakeful, had reached out for his fingers and was trying to bring them down to his mouth to suck on. "I really do. But it's just... let's say the ninetails thing isn't even an issue. Let's say nobody ever finds out. We keep it secret. Still, is here in Rain any better than there in Leaf? Dead center with Akatsuki? I mean Kakuzu's apartment is right down the hall, and honestly he's the best of them. What about Hidan? Or Sasori? Fuck, what about Orochimaru..."

"Orochimaru's not so bad."

"Do you know what he's got down in his laboratory right now?"

"If anything I think they'll all be kinder to the kid than Leaf will be. He's a freak just like them. Just like us. Right?"

Kakashi didn't answer that. The child had managed to capture his fingers and put them in its mouth. Kakashi stared pensively downward, while the boy stared bluely, curiously back up.

\----------

Obito had vaguely thought maybe he would find someone from the village to come live in the tower and be a nanny. He didn't get around to it. First he didn't get around to it for a couple of days, then for a couple of weeks, and in a few months he had stopped reminding himself guiltily that he ought to. He kept telling himself he needed to at least get a crib or something, but he didn't do that either. The boy slept in the bed between him and Kakashi, where the small dogs also slept, and the big dogs closed up the periphery as snuffling pillows and foot-warmers.

"I guess we can't call him Rin."

"No."

Morning light in Hidden Rain wasn't like morning light in Leaf. It was gray and dim. But once in a while when the clouds broke, there was this beautiful clarion quality to the whole world. Still lacking color, every detail was sharp, every shadow deep. They had pulled the curtains open wide. They lay in the illumined rectangle shining in on the bed, both propped on their elbows, looking down at the kid between them.

You'd think a new baby in a mercenary organization wouldn't get showered with a lot of gifts and toys. Not the case. There were black-stitched dolls all over the place, and paper flowers and birds spinning on mobiles from the ceiling, and a dozen different dull-edged play weapons, and a whole assortment of puppets that both Kakashi and Obito had bent and prodded in every way they could to make sure none of them shot poison darts or anything. The kid was cuddling with one now, and Obito still eyed it with a touch of wariness.

"I don't guess you know what Sensei was actually planning to name him?"

After a moment of still thought, Kakashi winced. "He told me. I don't remember."

"Anyone else who might know?"

"Hm." Kakashi winced again, very slightly. "One person."

\----------

They actually didn't have to leave Rain, to find him. They just waited for the next time he showed up on his own, and then tracked him down in Orochimaru's apartment.

"I thought... when Hiruzen told me he'd gone missing..." Jiraiya held the boy on his knees. He was a big man, and Obito kept thinking those hands could just smash the kid by accident. Jiraiya had never married, never had children of his own. How could he know how to handle a teeny tiny person without hurting it? But he was so careful, so gentle. Perhaps he had done this before, some time, some place. Or maybe he was just applying what he knew of handling small delicate toads to holding a human infant. It was impossible to say.

"Do you know what they were going to name him?" Kakashi asked.

"Oh, yes." Jiraiya smiled at the boy, bounced him. Behind him, leaning easily upon his broad shoulder, Orochimaru watched the baby with a reptilian stillness and thoughtfulness. His long dark hair had slipped down. The kid caught a lock of it in a little fist and chewed it--he did that with everything--and Obito jerked forward, slightly concerned, but the white snake didn't even react.

"I hope it wasn't something--" Orochimaru began, in a soft rasp.

"Naruto! That was what they had picked out. From one of my books, actually."

"--stupid. Ugh." Orochimaru gave a long, pained sigh.

\----------

So Naruto it was--and they couldn't exactly call him Namikaze, or Uzumaki, since that would blow the whole secret if Leaf ever caught wind of it. And he couldn't be Uchiha. The surname they settled on at last was Hatake. And all that anyone knew, outside of the organization, was that he was Kakashi's. A descendant of the White Fang. And it was largely rumored that he really was that. There was a little speculation that he was a foundling, adopted--but for the most part people accepted that he really was just what they claimed him as. Their own son.

"Am I?" Naruto asked one day. They were visiting Leaf, taking the back roads into the Uchiha District. Obito needed to speak with Fugaku about something, and Naruto had become close friends with his cousin. That was, with Obito's cousin--but most of the tangled blood ties in the clan were just _cousin,_ so that was what Naruto and Sasuke called one another as well.

"Are you what?"

"You know. Really yours, as well as Dad's? I mean, like with a henge or... however."

Such things were common within the Uchiha. An androgynous lot to begin with, men and women often switched around. Obito had gone ahead and let people assume what they would about his own gender preferences.

"Are you hoping to get out of the pretty much hundred-percent genetic guarantee of bizarre curses and madness that's on my side of the family?" Obito slung an arm out and looped it over the boy's shoulders. He would grow taller than Obito, probably--but he wasn't quite there yet. They turned their heads to look at one another. Obito had stolen this kid to begin with because he had loved Minato and Kushina. It hadn't really occurred to him at the time, ducking through that window, that someday he might love the child even more. Because in him was all of his lost mother and father, their tenderness and nobility. But also the shimmer of Obito's own mischief--and the way his heart ached sometimes from joy as well as sorrow, the way tears came so easily, the wild uncommon impulses. And Kakashi's cunning, the way Kakashi never doubted what he knew. All the best of them, new, warm and bright.

"Does it mean anything?" Obito asked.

"No. I just wondered."

Obito stayed quiet a while as they walked. By the time he had come up with what to say, they were almost at the big house. And there was Sasuke standing in the road, waving. "I stole you," he admitted. "From a big fancy cradle. You were so cute, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, and--"

"Yeah, yeah. Okay." Naruto rolled his eyes. He was already starting to bounce on his heels, wanting to run ahead. "Fine, don't tell me. I said I don't care. But Sasuke's going to give me a hard time again and it's not my fault I'm the only one here who's not all--" He hunched and sucked his cheeks in slightly and mimicked a mournful frown.

"I hope that wasn't supposed to be an impression of an Uchiha..."

"Well, it's not what _you_ look like."

"So it's not what you look like either, then." Obito gave him a little playful shove forward. "Just punch Sasuke in the nose or something. Not _everyone_ in the family looks exactly the same. You're lucky you're not fullblood. You don't even want to know what kinds of horrifying problems the rest of us are at risk for because of inbreeding. My great-uncle, they say his eyeballs just _exploded_ one day, just out of nowhere, and--"

"Wow, that's good. That's enough reassurance for now." Naruto took a few jogging steps ahead. Sasuke, who had been waiting for him, fell in step beside him, and the two of them started a race back toward the house.

"It's the truth!" Obito shouted after them. About the eyeball thing--but then, the rest of it, too.


	2. Chapter 2

Naruto's earliest memory is of the sky. Thunder and pouring rain, and his father grinning and asking him, "Ready?" and then dropping them both from the edge of the Tower. The thrilling rush of falling, like flying. Like being just another drop of water, while around them the jagged towers, the flickering lights and cables and catwalks of Hidden Rain shot past. And while Naruto shrieked with a toddler's fright and glee and clung to the edges of his father's cloak, his father held him tight. And before they got too near the ground, Kamui spiraled around them and took them to that place of silent stillness, and then tossed them back out at their starting place. Or fairly near it, anyway—up at the top of the city, rather than down in the flooded streets.

"Again!" Naruto remembers crying out, overjoyed. "Again, let's do it again!"

And it was a game that went on for an hour or more. Until both of them were soaked and shivering and bored with the risk of it all. By that time Naruto's soft cheek was leaned against the rough scars of his father's, and his eyes were drooping closed. So Obito took them both home.

"I wish you wouldn't play that stupid game with him."

"What? I'm not going to drop him, or anything."

"You'll teach him to be an idiot."

"My grandmother used to do this with me all the time, and I turned out just—don't make that face! You're the idiot!"

That's the end of the memory. Coming in through the upper eastern gateway of the Tower, back to the comforting, looming darkness, and both his fathers' voices raised in bantering argument. And then opening his eyes and watching sleepily as Kakashi leaned forward and tugged his mask down, and there was a grinning kiss between the two of them. It was all familiar. A thing that had happened before, a thing that would happen again. The warmth and perfect safety of being held, squeezed between their two chests as one welcomed home the other.


	3. Chapter 3

Here is the thing—that when it all began, when Obito came home with Minato's infant son and declared they would keep him, and for a long while after that—Kakashi did not want to be a father. Because for him the thought of fatherhood was the same as the thought of Sakumo on the floor, with his hands still gripping the handle of the heirloom sword, with the pool of blackened blood around him. That moment of horror and loss. The terrible and selfish betrayal.

Kakashi knew what a father might be. The most adored, most trusted part of a child's world—and equally the most frightening. He knew the enormous damage a father could do, even by accident, and he didn't want that kind of responsibility. He would fuck it all up the way his own dad had done. Or worse. Because really, Sakumo had been a kinder, more cheerful, warmer, more _caring_ man than Kakashi was.

Kakashi barely cared about anything.

Coldhearted. That's what they used to call him, in the ANBU. Which was a covert operative assassination squad, so what did that say about him? That people whose day-to-day job was _murder_ thought he was too unfeeling.

He brooded over that a lot, in the first couple weeks. Looking down at the infant while it slept, in his mind he went over everything he'd ever done wrong. All the mistakes he'd made. Everything he'd technically done right, too—like killing Rin, like killing all the people he'd killed, because it was his duty to do so.

"You think I'd ever do it to myself?"

"Huh?"

Kakashi asked the question without really meaning to, one night. They were in their apartment in Rain, and he'd been sitting at the table pretending to read while he actually watched Obito lying with the new baby, feeding it from a bottle. As far as Kakashi could tell, his friend wasn't having any sort of personal crisis at all about the child. But then, Obito was like that. Quite Kakashi's opposite, in this as in so many other ways. He let people into his heart as soon as he met them. His was deep and reckless love given freely to whomever asked for it. It had to do with being an Uchiha, Kakashi thought. And so perhaps it also particularly applied to infants—who were just a part of Uchiha life, Obito had told him. In the clan district, someone or other was always having a baby, just as someone or other was always so old they were dying. Obito had grown up over-exposed to the very young and very elderly alike. Life in all its stages and forms was intimately familiar to him. Which it was not, to Kakashi.

It was weird. It was really weird, to see his friend stretched out on his side with the little scrap of a blonde creature snugged against him. Quiet, smiling. The two of them watching one another—and an unsettling, powerful contentment around the pair. A bond of love between parent and child forming in perfect peace, while it stormed outside as always, and Kakashi looked on from across the room.

"What did you ask?" Obito said, glancing up sleepily at him.

Kakashi stayed quiet a while. "I don't know. I keep thinking about Sakumo. You think I'd ever do that? Put an end to it, like he did?"

Obito's eye widened. Just the one. He wasn't wearing the patch over the blind socket on the left. The only time he ever exposed that grisly injury was when it was just the two of them alone—three of them now, Kakashi supposed.

"Uh, are you _planning_ on..."

"No."

"Because I am going to be seriously pissed off if you kill yourself and leave me alone with this kid. I'm not joking. I will edo tensei your ass straight back here. With some kind of seal on you or something so you have to do whatever I say from then on."

"I'm not going to."

"Why ask?" Obito sat up, fussed with the kid for a minute and then came over and fisted his fingers in Kakashi's hair. He did it softly. Forced Kakashi's head down a bit, dragged it to one side and then the other. He let go and his hands slid down and clasped the back of Kakashi's neck. He bent and pressed their foreheads together. Gentle, in the way Obito only was when he was scared of something, which made Kakashi feel bad for starting the conversation at all. "Why ask?"

"Just what I said. I've been thinking about Sakumo. It's really nothing."

"I liked your dad."

"Yeah. I did, too."

"I mean. When I think about Sakumo Hatake, I remember how he'd drop you off and pick you up from everywhere. Nobody else's parents did that. It was Hidden Leaf. What trouble is a kid going to get into wandering around in a completely fortified village where everyone literally knows everyone else? And this one time, you and I were scuffling around fighting or something, and he pulled us apart and he was _laughing_. Like, it was just so funny to him. And he put his hand on my head and did this sort of thing—" Obito put his own hand down on Kakashi's head and ruffled his hair. "That probably sounds like nothing, right? But usually, in Leaf, back then... if someone outside the clan touched you even by accident, they would get really jumpy about it. There's a lot of superstition about Uchiha. Even little kids. Normal Leaf folk don't trust us not to curse the shit out of them."

"That's not true."

"It actually is. I mean, it's just little stuff, you know? But you notice it. How people kind of jerk away from you, and nobody wants to look you in the eye. Which is fair I guess, since looking Uchiha in the eye can be fatal. Anyway... my point is just, back then, your dad didn't care. He was really nice to me. I still remember it."

Kakashi wasn't sure what to say to that. He just put a hand on his friend's hip and held it there, and examined the sliver of moony skin exposed where Obito's shirt had rumpled up over the edge of his pants a bit.

"He only killed himself the one time," Obito said, drawing back a few steps. "All those times he didn't kill himself, he was a pretty great dad, right?"

Which was completely ridiculous. But—Kakashi thought, much later—true, and comforting, in a crackpot sort of way.


	4. Chapter 4

Obito is not allowed to leave Naruto in Itachi’s care while he is away—because, Yahiko snaps at him and points a finger in his face, this is a mercenary organization, not a daycare service.

But he does it anyway. Because he and Kakashi are a pair, of course. With their eyes, the shared vision and power of the sharingan. Otherwise one or the other of them might be able to just stay behind each time, and look after the kid. And sometimes they can pull that off. But not always. So, when he must, Obito entrusts the boy to his cousin.

“I don’t see it.”

“His mouth, maybe.”

“No. There’s nothing Uchiha about this kid. Not one thing. And look, he’s too big for it, too.” Shisui hefts the toddler up from the ground and, all wiry strength, dandles him and tosses him up in air a few times. He’s just visiting. Detouring through Rain on his way back from a mission to Cloud. And well, technically, he isn’t supposed to be here. And probably the guards around the tower would have stopped him from getting in, if they had seen him. But they didn’t see him. Leaf has a good relationship with the Akatsuki. The village has supplied many of the organization's most talented members, after all. Still, Yahiko has strong feelings about S-Class Jounin sneaking around his base without his permission. And he finds Shisui particularly irritating.

“Stop that,” Itachi says.

Shisui tosses the kid up higher than before, catches him, and wrestles him around in his arms as he squirms and shrieks for joy. It’s rough play. All Uchiha grow up surrounded by their young kin. Some of them learn to be tender and caring toward little ones—Shisui only learned to make chaos. It is the part of children that he loves. Their joy, their energy, their games. He catches and jumbles the boy around, grins and laughs and blows raspberry kisses against his arms.

“Yaargh, I’ll eat you up! I’ll steal your eyeballs!”

“No! Don’t!” But the boy is gasping and babbling with delight as he finally escapes and makes a toddling sprint for Itachi, who scoops him up and out of danger.

“Aw, what did you run to him for? He’s the worst.”

“Shush,” Itachi says. And oh, Shisui thinks, he’s just no fun anymore. He’s got all of Fugaku’s gravitas and Mikoto’s gentleness, and what a strange combination that makes. He holds Naruto the way he holds his own much younger sibling. So sure of himself. With such an eager, quiet, absolute affection. Love like that is every Uchiha’s birthright. The deep well of their chakra. You have to be careful with it, is the thing. Watch who you give it away to. Because it’s enough to break you, break them, enough to shake the world down, if it goes wrong.

“I don’t think this is Obito’s kid,” Shisui says.

“He says it is.” Itachi carries the baby over to the couch and sits down, settling him upon his lap.

“But he’s a liar.”

“I don’t see that it really matters. Perhaps Kakashi, some woman…”

“Yeah, right.”

“And anyway, they’re not claiming the clan name. They’re only claiming Hatake.”

Shisui hesitates. Shuffles his feet a bit, then crosses the room and sits beside Itachi. Hip-to-hip with him, one arm over those slender shoulders. So that Shisui has only to lean a bit sideways, and Itachi only needs to turn his head, and the two of them are resting their foreheads together. It’s nice. It’s warm, and familiar. Shisui stares into those eyes as red as—not as blood, not from deep in the body, from serious injury. But red like drops of blood from the little veins. The kind that wells up from fingertips that clasped tight around thorny branches, not expecting the prick, not expecting the sting. Bright, sunlit, startled red. Those are his own eyes, Shisui’s. His are Itachi’s. They switched them, as kids. There’s more than one way to stir up that great, darker power in their lineage. And so now the crows, the illusions, the tricks, the deadly sight belongs to both of them. Though the speed and persuasion are all Shisui’s—and Itachi is the only one who can summon spirits beyond the avian type.

“It’s… look, the ninetails…” Shisui begins.

“Quiet,” Itachi says. “Don’t say it.”

Because of course he’s worked it out, too. Not like it’s not a good lie. Uchiha don’t stick to man and woman, the way people from other clans do. They henge back and forth. The father of one child might easily be the mother of several others. So Obito’s claim on this child’s parentage isn’t outrageous. Not if you get it, not if you know how kinship works among Indra’s descendants. Obito might have borne a child. Sure. And everyone in Leaf knows he and Kakashi have been inseparable since they came back together a year after the accident. So it’s really perfectly believable, that the two of them say they have a son now. When the news got back to the village everyone who knew them was well pleased by it, and the elders were glad to know that the nearly-extinct Hatake clan had an heir—and wondered if the boy might inherit some of the lost techniques of that bloodline, and speculated that he—and any future siblings—might be useful someday, if Kakashi could be persuaded to move his family back home so that his children could be initiated properly as genin of the Hidden Leaf.

It was all plausible. If you didn’t know Obito that well. But Shisui did know Obito, and knew this kid wasn’t his. And highly doubted he was Kakashi’s, either. Do the math on that one. Why would they lie? And what catastrophe had all this coincided so exactly with? And Kushina was dead, and Kushina had been pregnant, and where was the ninetails?

“It isn’t the best thing for the village,” Shisui says, very quietly.

Itachi is quiet, at that. And Shisui wonders if the village is still his friend’s first loyalty. If it ever was. And if, in fact, if it is still his own. If Hiruzen told him to kidnap this child, would he do it? He might try. But then, he’d have to fight Obito, to do it—and he can’t imagine that going very well.

The window slams open and a terrifying creature steps in off the sill. Shockingly graceful, for such a big man—Kisame shakes himself off like an animal, runs a hand through his hair, and unfastens his cloak and lets it fall to the floor with a wet splat.

“This rain,” the swordsman of Mist complains. “All the streets are flooded up past the levees, I hope Yahiko is planning to—hey, what’s this, huh?”

The boy squirms from Itachi’s lap and runs cheerfully toward the gigantic murdering fishman. Kisame scoops him up in a wet embrace and grins jaggedly as the boy babbles to him, and fingers the slits of his gills and the skulled hilt of Samehada over his shoulder.

“Oh?” Kisame asks, listening. “Oh?”

So there is another problem, Shisui thinks. If Leaf ever wants the ninetails back, not only are they going to have to get through Obito and Kakashi for it, they’ll probably have to take down the Monster of the Mist. Possibly Itachi. And what if a bunch of the other dangerous lunatics in this place have bonded with it? There’s a guy in an apartment down the hall that kills people and makes their corpses into puppets. And Orochimaru is here, and one time Shisui saw that man take seven hours killing an enemy who’d pissed him off, and by the end the poor bastard was basically inside out.

It’s not possible. It’s simply not possible. Nobody, no team of highly trained ANBU even, could ever steal this kid. Leaf is never getting the ninetails back. The comfort of that thought makes Shisui feel slightly guilty. But, he tells himself—if the village doesn’t possess this weapon, to some extent the Uchiha Clan still does, so long as it is under Obito’s care and Itachi is around to keep an eye on things. That, at least, is for the best.


	5. Chapter 5

They never would have left the kid with Orochimaru if they hadn’t had to. But it was a last minute thing. No time to figure anything else out. And it helped that Jiraiya was visiting, and could basically be trusted to ensure his partner didn’t do anything really, really terrible. Obito trusted them both completely. They would, he assured Kakashi, do a great job. When Kakashi objected, Obito said fine, well—the only other two members of the organization not currently off on missions of their own were Deidara and Hidan, so one of them would probably be all right, and his vote was for Deidara.

Because maybe he would give the kid art lessons while they were gone, or something.

“Art lessons,” Kakashi had repeated, incredulous and horrified. “ _Art lessons?_ That explode?”

That had started off a loud, tense fight between the two of them, which they were still having when they finally dropped the boy off at Orochimaru’s apartment.

“This is some kind of jealousy thing.”

“Jealous. Jealous!” Kakashi scoffed. “Jealous of what?”

“I don’t know. Of Deidara?”

“For fuck’s sake. Why would I be.” But Kakashi’s hands tightened into fists, and the dark wheel of his sharingan twitched slightly.

“I don’t know. Because he’s totally hot, I guess.” Obito’s sly smile as he slipped that bit of nonsense torment into the argument was only for his son, and for Orochimaru—who was holding the kid. Behind his back, Kakashi looked and sounded like a man trying not to choke.

“Goodbye, baby.” Obito bent right into the White Snake’s arms to gather his boy against him, to squeeze him tight and kiss his whisker-marked cheeks and sunny hair. “Be good. We’ll be back soon.”

“Bye,” the child crooned back. And it was with that touching, heartbreaking concern, that little bit of melancholy that he always parted from his parents with. Those blue eyes watched the two of them intently, as they always did. Not that he wasn’t used to this sort of thing. But he didn’t like it. And he was at a sensitive age. Just beginning to gather a few words, to be curious, to understand the workings of the world around him.

It wasn’t fair, Obito thought—not fair at all, that any child should grow up a shinobi, among shinobi. And sometimes he wondered if the three of them ought to just leave it all. They could go to the other end of the world. He could take them there, in the blink of an eye. He had never really tried anything like that before, but he thought it was probably possible.

He stepped back. Kakashi took a step forward, and he nodded to their son and said, “See you soon.”

That initial coldness he had shown toward the child have never quite thawed. He was reserved with him. A little awkward, a little formal. Obito hated it. The whole attitude reminded him enormously of Fugaku, but even Fugaku had always taken deep pleasure in his sons, his nephews and nieces. With Kakashi, it was hard to tell. He cared about Naruto. But he kept himself distant from him. Even in little ways, like this. The two of them watched each other a moment, the man and the boy silent and wary, and then Kakashi turned toward the door.

“I’m not jealous,” he said.

“Like hell you’re not,” Obito snapped back, irritated all over again. Ready to go at it.

\-------

When the two of them were gone, Orochimaru shut the door on them and let out a long breath.

“Were we ever like that?”

“No.” Jiraiya, who was in the back of the room at a desk and hadn’t engaged the quarreling visitors except to lift a hand in greeting, put down his pen and pushed his chair back. One edge of his mouth jerked upward. “Tsunade and I were. Back then, you know. With you, we wouldn’t have dared.”

“Oh? To taunt me?”

“To be careless with you.”

Orochimaru did not respond, but only turned about with the child in his arms, looking down thoughtfully at it. People assumed that except for stealing babies for gobbling up or dumping into hideous experiments boogeyman style, he had no experience with this sort of thing. That was incorrect. They assumed it about Jiraiya, too—that all his life had been war, travel and scribing, with nothing in between. But there was an easy tenderness between the two of them. In fact, they had both done this before—some place, some time—and it was old and familiar, how they bent together over the little one. The pale thin arms around the small morsel; the big, scarred, brown arms around the fragile beloved and the quiet child.

“Minato, Minato,” Jiraiya said, looking down. “I just wish…”

“This is a better fate, I think. Imagine who he could be. Here, among us.”

“What a cruel thing to say.”

“I am cruel,” Orochimaru agrees.

And gentle also, Jiraiya thinks—curious, greedy, secretive, beautiful. He watches the lightless oil-slick fall of the long hair, the pale thin breastbone, the sweet and yearning focus of those golden eyes upon the face of the child. Cruel, cruel, cruel. He can remember a time when he thought he chose this. Chose Orochimaru, against his better judgement and the advice of everyone who knew them. Now he wonders if it was more inevitable than that. If there wasn’t a choice, really—only the one heart, the one soul, that was the inescapable other half of his own.

“Poor Kakashi,” Jiraiya laughs.

Though, Obito is not really anything like Orochimaru—so who knows? Maybe it will all go differently for that young couple. He hopes it does. He would not wish his own and Orochimaru’s particular mistakes and heartaches even on an enemy.


End file.
